It has been an incredible year at RLabs with more than 3,500 graduates across Africa through our various academy and training programmes. The final graduation for 2013 was in Cape Town where we celebrated with more than 1,200 guests at a beautiful venue at the V&A Waterfront. We invested more than $2 Million this year in scholarships and training.
It was also an exciting year of expansion as we launched RLabs in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Canada and Mozambique. We also had new additions to our passionate team around the world and our hundreds of volunteer champions who showed us what it meant to make hope contagious.
We’ve hosted co-creation events and “hackathons” with a highlight being our girls rising mobile application event with more than 30 girls participating. We’ve seen more than 40 social innovative applications being developed through these activities. We’ve also had more than 200 social projects that were done by RLabs members in 2013 with more than 15,000 hours of community work being served by our youth who were part of the GROW Leadership Academy.
RLabs also provide direct and indirect support to more than 250 small businesses during this year that had an estimated combined revenue/income of more than US$4 Million. Through our Innovation Incubator and Accelerator (InnovIA) programme we launched 6 new social enterprises during 2013 with one of our enterprises being acquired.
We also had some exciting new initiatives by our team during this year including the Girl Rising Initiative and Lets Grow to just name but a few. Our mobile counseling project being spearheaded by Adrian Barnes and the Impact Direct Ministries team have serviced more than 30,000 individuals this year.
All of the above is just a snapshot of the amazing 2013 and this is all due to our incredible partners who made this all possible. We are looking forward to a bigger 2014 and wish everyone a wonderful year ahead.
